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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Must read: Get Up Off The Floor

Definitely read the whole thing: Sarah Hoyt, author and occasional substitute blogger at Instapundit has advice for "those of you who are, at heart, constitutionalists, but who say “it’s all over, give up, they’ve won." (Emphasis mine)

Get up off the floor. First, if you’re a believer, despair is a sin. And if you’re not a believer, despair is spitting on the graves of all the men and women who fought in much worse conditions than you face. The ghosts of Tiananmen Square rise up against you. The men who in the Gulags carried a hope of freedom accuse you. The victims of communism point fingers at you. The millions of dead at the hands of marching statism would like to remind you that to give up is to die. And that’s when you should give up. Not a second earlier.

But worse than that – despair is a sin and an insult on the brave dead… And it might be stupid too.

You’re going to point to the fact that the left – Marxists – control education and that even in Europe, even in countries that suffered under communism, they think socialism is great. This is because the left has education and the history books have been revised. I can tell you having been raised in Europe that people are taught to equate capitalism and monarchy, and all the crimes of monarchy are ascribed to capitalism, and socialism/communism is opposed to this.

Here is the problem for them, though – socialism doesn’t work. As Thatcher said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. They are. Yes, there will be fire and blood, but at the end of it there just might be sanity. Voices that point out that communism/socialism in their end result are much closer to monarchy than capitalism ever was are needed. People who hold aloft the ideals of individual liberty are needed. It’s not time to fall on your sword, yet. It might never be, because…

Yes they control the education system in most of the world. But education is already getting hit with the same sort of catastrophic change that hit publishing. I’ve seen the signs. I’ve seen the middle class kids who are home/online schooled up to the last two years, then go to school the last two years, just to establish records for college entrance. In ten years we’ve come this far. In another three or four, things will come tumbling down. And it will be sudden, as it’s been for publishing.

They have mass media. Yes, indeed they do. But we have a million voices rising up in protest. We might each be tiny pebbles in an endless lake, but we ripple… More importantly, we have the ability to tell stories that subtly propagate different world views. The uniform lie has broken. There is no “what everybody thinks.” They’re shouting really loudly through the remaining channels to give the impression they’re winning. But the mirror has cracked from side to side and their doom has come upon them. They know it. That’s why they try to sound so confident and secure.

They are not. Hollywood has the money and the great effects, but it is running out of ideas, and it shows in the endless remakes. And the tech will catch up with them too. They’re next, after education.

They have vote fraud – yes, they do – but even in Wisconsin where they had instituted the same rules they’re putting in in Colorado, if the people get riled enough, there isn’t enough fraud to wash that away. Let’s get the recall going, and if that fails volunteer to watch the polls. If nothing else, be vocal about what happened afterwards. Daylight is a disinfectant.

They have the government. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, that’s a booby prize. The new technologies are personalized, individualized, mobile. And more so every year. Their model works best on a unified society where the technologies are best used to serve/talk to/control millions. When they try it on a modern society, not only doesn’t it work, it fails spectacularly.

They belong to the past. We? We’re from liberty and we carry it with us. We’re from the future, and we’re headed there. And despite brief disgusting localized intervals where it goes the other way, the future is always better than the past.

Besides, in the long run? Guess who is reproducing? Oh, yes, we’re buying a lot of low-skill, low-ability-to-survive babies. But low ability to survive is low ability to survive. Remove the support system, and that population will either break out of learned helplessness (my bet) or become much smaller.

Meanwhile, the responsible people who have strong beliefs about individual freedom (many of whom are religious) are having more kids than just about anyone else and, more importantly, raising them to be responsible people with strong beliefs about individual freedom. This is because these people have hope for the future. Thinking we’re all going to die screaming doesn’t encourage anyone to make babies. And thinking you need someone to hold your hand all through life doesn’t either.